Letters

Blinded by a French philosophical fetish

Participants in the recent spat about French thought seem to think French philosophers agree with one another (Letters, April 19). But Anglo-American thinkers who attack the difficulty of French philosophy had an unlikely ally in the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who once described Derrida's thought as "obscurantisme terroriste".

Annie Seaton's fantasy about the superiority of French thought and Raymond Tallis's attack on French gibberish both assume there is such a thing as "French thought". One of philosophy's virtues is that it is interested in the transmission of ideas across national boundaries. As French universities have turned away from Foucault and Derrida, there must be more "continental philosophers" in the US now. And the most important "continental" philosophers are Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, who were all German. Why, though, do Britons and Americans feel the need to fetishise France?Dr Jon E Wilson King's College London

Contrary to Michael Lewis's assertions, the philosophers who objected to Cambridge's offer of an honorary degree to Derrida made a perfectly clear and rational case against acknowledging this intellectual charlatan. Their clarity was acknowledged by one of Derrida's supporters, who argued that, since Derrida has demonstrated that truthfulness is inversely proportional to clarity, the clarity of the philosophers' attack on Derrida undermined their own position. When this is the opposition we have to deal with, it may come as no surprise that some analytic philosophers have lost heart in pressing their arguments against "continental" philosophers.Dr Ross Cameron University of Leeds

As a British chartered psychologist who worked with a French research group, I found the French discipline of occupational psychology theoretically much in advance of our own. The French concept of "competence", for example, is grounded in far more sophisticated theories of human action than the British equivalent. If the work of Janine Rogalski, Jean-François Richard and Jacques Leplat is unknown in the UK, the explanation is not our superiority but the linguistic constraints we willingly place on our understanding.Prof Nick Boreham University of Stirling

Whatever its merits, French philosophy provides the vocabulary of academic discourse, which appears to be very much about making the right noises. The result is sloppy and even fake scholarship. Valentine Cunningham illustrates this with an excellent example in his Reading After Theory: "You have to feel a bit sorry for the editors of the journal Social Text, so utterly taken in by Alan D Sokal's spoof article Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."Hetty ter Haar West Byfleet, Surrey